bellevue
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Bill Zhu and the problem of finishing
Zheqing (Bill) Zhu spent seven years at Meta working on machines that make decisions. At Pokee AI, he is taking that experience into the untidy business of getting a whole job done.
Steve Dimmer and the art of handing over the keys
Steve Dimmer spent decades turning engineering ideas into companies. At CurvaFix, his work culminated in a $39 million financing round and a handoff to the next CEO.
Samir Bodas and the promises after the signature
Samir Bodas built Icertis around the business hidden inside contracts. His own test was just as practical: could a growing company keep the promises it made to its people?
Ron Wiener and the education of a startup mechanic
He sold an airplane to help finance Earth Class Mail and let television cameras follow the fundraising. Now Ron Wiener is helping founders understand the machinery before they put their companies inside it.
Herbert Ong and the art of watching what happens next
Before he became “The $TSLA Milestones Guy,” Herbert Ong built companies and products. His second act puts that experience to work on camera, following Tesla through interviews, timelines and the occasional ride in the back seat.
Network Computing Architects and the fireproof safe that wasn't
A Bellevue network specialist lost its office to fire, then kept building the systems other businesses depend on. Its most useful lesson lives in the gap between buying technology and making it work.
CoreStack and the Cloud Bill Nobody Owned
A hundred thousand cloud resources can make a company remarkably modern and remarkably confused. CoreStack sells the missing discipline: a way to connect every resource, risk and dollar to someone responsible.
Ravi Bulusu and the Long Way Around to Building What Matters
A software engineer tried to answer a shortage with a factory. Immigration rules, overseas supply chains and a Senate witness table turned that practical impulse into a revealing American story.
Melissa Waggener Zorkin Built a Global Agency by Asking One Small Question
From a free Portland office to more than 1,500 people in over 100 markets, the founder of We. Communications has spent four decades translating technological change into human terms - and keeping purpose in the room.
The Expense Report That Refused to Die: How Concur Turned an $8 Million Near-Miss Into SAP’s $8.3 Billion Cloud Bet
Concur began with floppy disks and a universal workplace nuisance. Three pivots, one near-death cloud bet and a record SAP acquisition later, it is trying to make the expense report disappear altogether.
Caleb Wang Put a Family Archive in the Freezer Aisle
A finance operator went looking for the flavors he missed, then built the cold-chain machinery to share them. At MìLà, Caleb Wang treats every dumpling as both a product and a small act of cultural preservation.
The Soup Dumpling That Escaped the Restaurant
Jen Liao and Caleb Wang couldn't find a good soup dumpling in Bellevue, so they built one you can keep in your freezer - and turned 500 test recipes into a grocery-aisle brand with Simu Liu on the payroll.
Ana-Maria Constantin
Ana-Maria Constantin is the CEO and co-founder of Cascade AI, a Bellevue-based startup building agentic AI that automates the grind of HR and back-office operations. A Harvard dual major in computer science and astrophysics who left Romania after high school, she spent five-plus years as a software engineer at Microsoft writing code that touched millions of users on Azure before deciding HR - the function that touches more lives than any other in a company - was the perfect place to point machine learning. She raised a $5.45M-plus seed round led by Google's Gradient Ventures with AlleyCorp, was named GeekWire's Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, and recognized as a 2025 Google Cloud Partner All-Star.
Aran Khanna
Aran Khanna is the co-founder and CEO of Archera, a Bellevue-based startup that helps companies cut cloud bills by guaranteeing deep discounts without locking them into long-term commitments, backed by insurance and reinsurance capacity. A Harvard computer science and math graduate, he first made headlines in 2015 when his Chrome extension Marauder's Map exposed a location-tracking flaw in Facebook Messenger and cost him a Facebook internship. He went on to research privacy at Harvard, build neural-network tools as an AI engineer at AWS, and co-found Archera in 2019 with his brother Nikhil.
Stephanie Ferguson
Stephanie Ferguson is Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Global Demand Center (GDC), the unified engine that powers all of Microsoft's global digital customer engagement. With 25+ years at Microsoft and a career that spans IBM, the insurance industry, and a family fashion business, she built the GDC from the ground up — combining data, digital marketing, and AI into a single connected sales-and-marketing machine. A Wharton MBA and Dartmouth economics graduate, she is also a passionate advocate for equity in education and served as Board President of the Bellevue Schools Foundation.